by Jo Roberts
Yes, it can happen. I don’t think it’s the most likely scenario. I think Israelis would use other means before resorting to that one, such as escalating the basic policies toward the Palestinian minority, curbing their rights even more, and in turn there could be an intensified nationalization of the Palestinians, maybe a more active part in the struggle against Israel. So there are all kinds of scenarios there, but it’s not an unlikely scenario. Again, I think it’s a very difficult one to predict because it’s a very difficult operation to carry out in this time and age, compared to 1948.
My worry, my big worry, is that nobody rules it out morally or ethically. The whole debate in Israel is on practical terms. So from a practical point of view it seems that the political elite in Israel doesn’t think that it’s feasible now; but that doesn’t mean that they won’t think that way in the future.
Ephraim Kleiman read Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh when it came out. “It hit me right between the eyes,”[68] he wrote. He’d served in the Negev desert during the mopping-up campaigns of early 1949, and Yizhar “had succeeded in relating what we had seen and reflected on from our observation point above that Bedouin encampment…” less than a year before. For him, reading Khirbet Khizeh was “first and foremost an intensely private — even literary — experience: he described my feelings and thoughts better than I could have done myself.”
Kleiman reflected on his experience in an article he wrote in 1986, prompted in part by the ethical failures of the Lebanon War. Reflecting on the expulsion he himself had taken part in, he pointed out that
Our conscience was also anaesthetized by the strangeness, the otherness, that differentiated the Arabs from the society we knew. These generated alienation, hence also non-identification with their suffering.…[69]
This alienation continues in the two separate worlds inhabited by Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. It is this ongoing separation that, as in Kleiman’s day, makes it possible to consider transfer as a viable option.
“Yes, Khirbet Khiz’eh [sic] did happen,”[70] Kleiman tersely ends his piece. “No, it was not an exception, an ‘excess.’ It was part of the realization of Zionism, its dark side, if you will. It is the price others paid for our right to national existence. It will continue to gnaw at us for a long time to come. We had better learn to live with it.”
That learning is still taking place. The politics of the Nakba continue to unfold in Israel, stretched between the twin polarities of transfer and right of return. Although the work of the New Historians, Benny Morris in particular, is taught in the universities, and accepted as a given in the pages of Haaretz, many people don’t want to hear about it. As a still-emerging challenge to Israel’s founding story, the narrative of the Palestinian Nakba is fragile — vulnerable to erasure or, as we have seen, co-option into nationalist ideologies of necessity and security.
But although the history of the Nakba may be something of a wild card in Israeli public discourse, acknowledging the catastrophe that the Palestinian people suffered in 1948 is a precondition to any serious reconciliation. Without it, there will be too little common ground on which to build something new. Amaya Galili of Zochrot put it succinctly. “In other social justice work I’ve been involved with, I felt we were touching the periphery,”[71] she told me. “Here, I feel we are touching the core.”
* * *
* Israel Television operates under the auspices of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority, whose board consists of political appointees. The structure is similar to that of the BBC in Great Britain.
† Israel’s invasion was designed to dislodge the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon, where several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees were living. In the course of the war, Israel became embroiled not only with the various Palestinian armed factions but also with Syria, which had a significant military presence in Lebanon.
‡ Historiography is the writing of history, or the study of the writing of history.
§ Simha Flapan and Tom Segev are also counted among the original New Historians, but Flapan died the year that his book was published, and Segev’s work focuses less directly on the 1948 War. My focus is on those who researched and wrote specifically about the Palestinian exodus — Benny Morris and, later, Ilan Pappé. (The work of other, more recent historians would also bring them into the “New Historians” category.)
¶ The present-day borders of the Biblical Land of Israel have never been conclusively defined, but would include the West Bank and Gaza, at least.
** During the war, Jordanian forces moved west from the Jordan River to the Green Line, occupying what became known as the West Bank, which Jordan then held until the Six-Day War in 1967. They did not enter the territory of the proposed Jewish state, only engaging with Israeli troops who had moved into lands designated for the Arab state.
†† Morris spent three weeks in jail in 1988 for refusing the call up to join his artillery unit in the West Bank, and his work brought him as much notoriety as fame: despite being a prolific and largely respected scholar, he earned a precarious freelance living until finally landing a university job in 1996.
‡‡ Zochrot’s work finds parallels in the political heritage tours conducted by the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory in South Africa, and in the “Great Indian Bus Tours” sponsored by the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto.
§§ Like that of other committed Jewish-Israeli peace activists, Zochrot’s very presence builds bridges. In a fifth-anniversary message to Zochrot, Chicago-based Salah Mansour, who manages the encyclopedic Palestine Remembered website chronicling the depopulations of 1948, wrote: “we on the outside — westerners, Muslim and Christian Palestinians — think that you are all one group: All of you are Zionists, soldiers. It is very important that there be other faces, to show that there is more than one kind of Israeli. It is important to us to know that there really are Israelis who care about the Palestinians.” Zochrot website: http://zochrot.org/en/content/remembering-palestinian-tragedy. Salah grew up in the village of Qaqun.
¶¶ The West Bank has never been formally annexed to Israel; such an action would be in breach of international law. But settlement is a de facto step toward annexation. In any future peace deal, it is highly unlikely that the Israeli government will agree to the depopulation of its larger West Bank settlements.
*** Thus perceived, this problem is heightened by the demographic realities: in Israel and the Occupied Territories combined, the relative numbers of Jews and Arabs are fast approaching parity, and the Palestinian birth rate is higher.
Chapter nine
Histories Flowing Together
On a warm autumn day I travelled across the Galilee, on Highway 89, through a rolling landscape of small settlements and farmland. I was with Dahoud Badr — he had met me at the train station in Nahariya and was driving me to see the hilltop remains of al-Ghabsiya, the village where he was born. Signs along the highway gave the names of the red-roofed villages that we passed: Ben Ammi, Kibbutz Kabri. But Dahoud was alerting me to a different, hidden landscape. “That used to be al-Nahr,”[1] he said, pointing towards the fields and orchards off to the right. “And over there, there was the village of al-Kabri.”
The geography of Israel cradles two conflicting histories of 1948, one of a world that ended and one of the state that was born. Two entirely separate collective memories grow out of this landscape, one visible, one erased, and while this imbalance continues it is hard to imagine peace in the land.
Israel’s New Historians first reframed the 1948 War to include the Palestinian Catastrophe over twenty years ago. If Zochrot is right in saying that “[t]he Nakba is the central, unspoken trauma at the core of the Israel/Palestine conflict,”[2] then what role, I wondered, has the New Historians’ research played in the world of diplomacy and peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians? I asked Benny Morris what he saw as the political value of his work:[3]
It’s a positive step in relation that society should know the trut
h about themselves. The truth is important, it’s a value in itself. Whether it’s good for political relations with the others or not is a different question. What is important for peace is that the two sides recognize each other’s needs and rights, and agree to compromises and so on, on the major issues. That’s where peace will be had or not. It’s not to do with whether people change their views of what happened in ’48 or not.
But our collective understanding of the past helps mould the political landscape we inhabit. People’s perceptions of what happened in 1948 dictate how they evaluate Palestinian claims, and how they instinctively respond when they hear about “the Nakba.” And what Israel believes of its founding will affect how it relates to the Palestinians as the two negotiate for peace.
Certainly, for Palestinians, the importance of acknowledging the Nakba extends into the sphere of diplomatic relations. At the Camp David summit in 2000, the Palestinian team specifically requested that Israel take responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Camp David talks failed, but the Palestinian demand for an acknowledgement of “moral responsibility” was again on the table at the follow-up round of negotiations, which took place in Egypt, at Taba.
Knesset member and then–Justice Minister Yossi Beilin had been involved in the Oslo peace process from its inception in the early 1990s, and he was part of the Israeli negotiating team sent to Taba in January 2001. Taba was the last gasp of the Oslo peace process. It was also the closest any negotiators have come to resolving the conflict.
Writing a few months after the talks came to a halt (after the Labour government in Israel collapsed and the Clinton administration in the U.S. had been voted out of office, which killed any likelihood that the talks would resume) Beilin described the talks at Taba as “the best ever held between the parties, and the closest ever to reaching an agreement.”[4] Fellow negotiator Abed Rabbo, from the Palestinian team, concurred: “After the Taba negotiations, we were very close to reaching an agreement, but the change in the Israeli government after the elections stopped everything.”[5] Beilin also noted, “We were very close to an agreement concerning the story of the creation of the refugee problem, which described the Israeli approach and the Palestinian approach to the issue, and their common denominator.”[6]
Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé both told me that Yossi Beilin had been influenced by their work, and had told them so. “The wisdom of Taba was that we could refer to the two narratives in the evolving Palestinian refugee problem, without accepting either of them,”[7] Beilin commented later. “The mere fact that we could refer to them and respect both narratives was enough to satisfy both sides that their story is not being ignored.”[8]
At Taba, the Israeli negotiators took an unprecedented step. In a negotiating document submitted to the Palestinians during the talks and later published, the Israelis stated: “The State of Israel solemnly expresses its sorrow for the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees, their suffering and losses, and will be an active partner in ending this terrible chapter that was opened 53 years ago, contributing its part to the attainment of a comprehensive and fair solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.”[9]
Such language sidesteps the Palestinians’ explicit request; while it acknowledges the existence of Palestinian historical suffering, it doesn’t claim responsibility for it. Nevertheless, it is a far cry from the traditional Israeli narrative about Palestinians running away. And, history suggests, even flawed acknowledgements of past suffering can build bridges. In 1950, foundering under the economic burden of so many Jewish refugees, Ben-Gurion’s government approached the West Germans, proposing reparations payments as compensation for the lost assets of the murdered Jews of Europe.*
West Germany, eager to establish some moral credibility in the eyes of the world, agreed. But before diplomatic channels could formally be opened between the two countries, the Israelis demanded a public statement of Germany’s national responsibility for the genocide of European Jewry.
This was a contentious point. Negotiations went on for months. Chancellor Adenauer’s speech was drafted and redrafted, and was finally given the go-ahead by both the Israeli government and the World Jewish Congress. In September 1951, Adenauer stood before the Bundestag and announced:
The government of the Federal Republic and with it the great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that was brought upon the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories during the time of National Socialism. The overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes committed against the Jews and did not participate in them. During the National Socialist time, there were many among the German people who showed their readiness to help their Jewish fellow citizens at their own peril — for religious reasons, from distress of conscience, out of shame at the disgrace of the German name. But unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity, both with regard to the individual harm done to the Jews and with regard to the Jewish property for which no legitimate individual claimants still exist.[10]
His words were followed by three minutes of silence.
As a statement of German national responsibility for the Holocaust, Adenauer’s speech leaves a great deal to be desired. As political scientist Ian Lustick, who has researched the diplomatic maneuverings behind the speech, points out, it offers little acknowledgement of the known “involvement, support, or acquiescence of the majority of Germans in the war against the Jews.”[11] There is no admission of guilt, no language of repentance, no apology. And yet while many Israelis (and, for very different reasons, many Germans)† chafed against it, this statement succeeded in paving the way for the much-needed reparations payments, and eventually, diplomatic relations between the two countries. Lustick argues that this melding of realpolitik with the “emotional truth” of the extreme suffering endured by the Jews created a space wide enough to hold both understandings of the past, common ground on which to build a new political relationship.
Historical trauma, be it genocide or forced exodus, demands some kind of acknowledgement before reconciliation can begin. If such a process could become part of the social consensus around a comprehensive, workable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, then, as Lustick says, “Israelis would be gradually socialized away from depending on narratives of national pride that require the denial of palpable Palestinian truths;”[12] ‡ a process which, he believes, would be crucial in normalizing relations between them.
But the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 isn’t simply a historical event in the past, over and done with. What would a formal acknowledgement of past suffering mean to Palestinian Israelis, when the Nakba still spills over into their lives today? Dahoud Badr is asking for more than that. “I want to have my rights as a citizen of this state,” he told me, “equality for all citizens. The state of its inhabitants, not the state of the Jews.”
I talked with Nira Yuval-Davis, the woman we met in the introduction, whose childhood memories of Tantura were shattered by discovering its history.[13] She now teaches at the University of East London, where she is director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees, and Belonging. Nira didn’t want to talk about Tantura; time and experience have again shifted her perspective. “Then it was about understanding the past,” she told me; “now, it’s about what’s going on now.”
Nira has been back to Israel many times over the past decades. “Because I come from outside,” she said, “I can experience the qualitative difference” of the changes in Israeli society. She believes that “The relationship between Jews and Palestinians§ has become much more racialized, more based on hate.”
Nira sees that ethnic divide in Israel as looming ever larger in the debates over the nature of the state. “It’s a question of ongoing trauma, ongoing racialization,” she said to me. This has only been complicated by the shifts in population within both groups. “Israeli society is so much more complex and fragmented now.
There are internal divisions among the Palestinians, and among the Jews, and the power relations are much more contested.”
To illustrate her point, she told me about the city of Lod (formerly Lydda), ten miles southeast of Tel Aviv. The Arab community, whose oldest inhabitants have lived in the city since before its forced evacuation in 1948, also includes Bedouin, displaced from the Negev and resettled in Lod, and Gaza Palestinians who collaborated with the occupying military administration and were relocated for protection. Similarly, the first wave of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the conquered city after 1948 has been joined in recent decades by new arrivals from Ethiopia and from the former Soviet Union. Now new gated communities, for ultra-Orthodox only, are also appearing across the city. Wealth and employment rates vary widely among the Jewish sectors. There is little social mixing among any of these discrete ethnic groups — between Arabs and Jews these days there is virtually none — and the disparities between them, economic and racial, have fractured into tensions both between and within the Jewish and Arab communities. Such complexities make the framing of a common Israeli identity even more difficult.
Racial isolation is mandated by the local council, which has built a wall three metres high enclosing Lod’s Arab neighbourhoods, effectively ghettoizing them. Within this wall there is no provision of street lighting or garbage pickup, and some streets run with open sewage.[14]
What Nira names as the increasing racialization of Israeli society has its roots in the social trends and government policies of the years after the state’s founding. The paths laid down then have been those along which Israel has travelled. Arab Israelis are still excluded, positioned as outsiders and possibly dangerous ones at that: a potential fifth column. And Mizrahi Jews, who traded their Arab identity as the price of entry into Israeli citizenship, still have much less of a foothold in the Israeli establishment than their Ashkenazi counterparts.